Notes for season 4 episode 22, “YHWH“
01:00 “Utilities are yet to determine what is behind these power surges. Speculation ranges from aging infrastructure to Chinese hackers” Ah, the story of the last twenty years: We can’t tell the difference between the consequences of our own political decisions, or someone actively trying to harm us.
The news suggests the power surges are moving West-to-East across the US. But the US doesn’t have a single interconnected power grid. The mainland US (and much of Canada) has multiple independent power grids with two regions, east and west. This is why, for example, the Texas power outage in 2021 was limited to the state, because it had no interconnection with the rest of the country (to avoid federal oversight). Simultaneous failures of non-interconnected systems should definitely look like a co-ordinated attack to TV news.
02:21 Root puts a laptop, probably the MacBook Pro, into the Bulletproof briefcase – but she should also have added a power adaptor, cable, and a Mini DisplayPort to VGA/HDMI adaptor, since she might be going somewhere that “doesn’t usually deal with Macs”.
04:15 Greer looks out at a confluence of overhead power and communication cables. A visual reminder of the messiness of 20th Century urban infrastructure.
09:04 We briefly see Caleb’s driving license, issued in 2008 with a 1995 DOB – ie when he was 13.
14:44 Somehow Dominic decides to order Elias to be shot, instead of immediately doing it himself. Basically “Have some unnamed characters kill the prisoners, but not until after I’ve left the room” situation.
14:50 “What the hell is that?” “An old fax machine.”
16:10 Grice is able to disable a home alarm just by cracking open the control panel and blindly pulling on some wires? Seems like a serious design flaw.
18:00 Another appearance of the “Chocolate Vortex” poster.
19:55 Control has an ornate wood-finish sound-proofed box on her desk, which presumably doubles as a Faraday cage, as otherwise Samaritan would be able to detect that the Senator’s phone was being hacked.
23:32 Finch, driving an NYPD vehicle, determines that he’d be unable to drive to Brooklyn fast enough due to traffic. The Machine hacks the traffic lights to assist them, but couldn’t they have engaged the siren?
25:15 Finch and Root enter the Brooklyn house, and it appears it’s an electrical substation. Likely this is inspired by a combination of the hidden MTA ventilation house and substation mentioned in a 2012 post on Untapped New York.
27:00 Root plugs the experimental RAM chips into a motherboard installed in the bulletproof briefcase. The props look more like mSATA SSD boards, but it’s difficult to tell.
28:00 Finch discovers that the Thornhill electrical regulator boxes have computers inside them. “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these” as the old meme puts it.
30:00 Control determines that Samaritan’s plan is to kill the Supreme Court in order to pack the court with judges amenable to granting powers of mass-surveillance. This episode aired in May 2015, 9 months before the death of Justice Scalia and the blocked nomination of Merrick Garland… which eventually enabled Trump to appoint three supreme court judges in a single term.
30:30 While carrying data over power-lines has been trialled for broadband services, technical challenges mean it has mostly been restricted to meter reporting.
33:30 I believe the props being used as the laptops preforming the compression are the 2014 Toshiba Chromebook 2.
31:30 The idea is that the “core heuristics” of The Machine could be downloaded to the briefcase RAM chips if compressed. (But also a previous episode implied the Machine’s state could be printed out and typed back in by a small office of people?)
36:30 “No one will question Samaritan, because no-one will ever know when it has acted.”
39:30 They apparently waited until the season 4 finale to use Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine”.
40:45 “The Correction”, using mass surveillance to identify outliers that might threaten future activities (and kill them) was also a plot point in 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” (Project Insight).
And that’s season four down, just 13 episodes to go.